György Lukács ( /ˈluːkɑːtʃ/; Hungarian pronunciation: [ˌɟørɟ ˈlukaːtʃ]; (13 April 1885 – 4 June 1971) was a Hungarian philosopher, æsthetician, literary historan, critic, and Marxist. He was the founder of Western Marxism, the interpretive tradition that departed from the Marxist ideologic orthodoxy of the USSR; as such, he developed the theory of reification, and contributed to Marxist theory with developments of the class consciousness theory by Karl Marx. As a literary critic György Lukács was especially influential, because of his theoretical developments of realism and of the novel as a literary genre. In 1919, he was the Hungarian Minister of Culture of the government of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic (March–August 1919).

Georg Lukács was born Löwinger György Bernát, in Budapest Hungary, to the investment banker József Löwinger (later Szegedi Lukács József; 1855–1928) and his wife Adele Wertheimer (Wertheimer Adél; 1860–1917), who were a wealthy Jewish family. As an Austro–Hungarian subject, the full names of Georg Lukács were the German Georg Bernhard Lukács von Szegedin, and the Hungarian Szegedi Lukács György Bernát; as a writer, he published under the names Georg Lukács and György Lukács. As a student, Georg Lukács studied at the universities of Budapest and Berlin, and received his doctorate in 1906 in Kolozsvár.

Chris Nineham is one of the founder members and now one of the National Officers of the Stop the War Coalition in the UK. He was one of the main organisers of the 15 February 2003 anti-war protest against the invasion on Iraq.

He was a leading member of Globalise Resistance, the anti-globalisation network that mobilised thousands on protests in Genoa and elsewhere and he played an important role in the European and World Social Forums. He was a member of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers' Party until he resigned in 2010.

He has written widely on the anti-war movement and the anti-capitalist movement as well as on the media, modernism and cultural theory.

In 1985 Chris Nineham served as the drummer of indie-pop band The June Brides.

Ágnes Heller (born 12 May 1929 in Budapest) is a Hungarian philosopher. A prominent Marxist thinker at first, she moved onto a liberal, social-democratic position later in her career. In addition to political and social thought, she also concentrates on Hegelian philosophy, ethics, and existentialism.

Ágnes Heller was raised in a middle-class Jewish family, and her father, Pal Heller, was never able to stay with a single job for very long. During World War II however, he used his legal training and knowledge of German to help people get together the necessary paperwork to emigrate from Nazi Europe. In 1944, Heller’s father was deported, along with 450,000 other Hungarian Jews, to the Auschwitz concentration camp where he died before the war ended. Heller and her mother managed to avoid deportation as a result of luck and practical wit.

With regard to the influence of the Holocaust on her work, Heller said:

In 1947, Heller began to study physics and chemistry at the University of Budapest. She changed her focus to philosophy, however, when her boyfriend at the time urged her to listen to the lecture of the Marxist philosopher György Lukács, on the intersections of philosophy and culture. At the time (and ever since), she did not understand the philosophical terminology.^{[citation needed]} However, she was immediately taken by how much his lecture addressed her concerns and interests in how to live in the modern world, especially after the experience of World War II and the Holocaust. Faced with the existential choice between Marxism and Zionism, Heller chose Marxism and did not seek to emigrate to Israel.

Alain Soral (born October 2, 1958) is a French essayist, and film maker, as well as being the author of several polemical essays. He is the brother of the actress Agnès Soral. Soral lives in the French Basque Country. Since June 2004, he has been a boxing coach. Alain Soral considers himself to be in the political "avant garde" of French society, claiming that his remarks and comments are always at first condemned and later widely accepted by the mainstream French public.

Soral was born in Aix-les-Bains, Savoie and grew up in the suburbs of Annemasse (department of Haute-Savoie), where he attended a local primary school. When Soral was about 12, his family moved to Meudon so that he could go to a reputable private Catholic high school, the Collège Stanislas de Paris. Soral spent two years doing small jobs before being accepted into the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts at 20, where he studied for two years. Soral was then taken in by a family of academics, who encouraged him to enrol at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, where he attended lectures given by Cornelius Castoriadis.

George Walton Lucas, Jr. (born May 14, 1944) is an American film producer, screenwriter, director, and entrepreneur. He is the founder, chairman and chief executive of Lucasfilm. He is best known as the creator of the space opera franchise Star Wars and the archaeologist-adventurer character Indiana Jones. Lucas is one of the American film industry's most financially successful directors/producers, with an estimated net worth of $3.2 billion as of 2011.

George Lucas was born in Modesto, California, the son of Dorothy Ellinore (née Bomberger) and George Walton Lucas, Sr. (1913–1991), who owned a stationery store.

Lucas grew up in the Central Valley town of Modesto and his early passion for cars and motor racing would eventually serve as inspiration for his USC student film 1:42.08, as well as his Oscar-nominated low-budget phenomenon, American Graffiti. Long before Lucas became obsessed with film making, he wanted to be a race-car driver, and he spent most of his high school years racing on the underground circuit at fairgrounds and hanging out at garages. However, a near-fatal accident in his souped-up Autobianchi Bianchina on June 12, 1962, just days before his high school graduation, quickly changed his mind. Instead of racing, he attended Modesto Junior College and later got accepted into a junior college to study anthropology. While taking liberal arts courses, he developed a passion for cinematography and camera tricks. George Lucas graduated from USC in California.